Recent Posts: Influencer Relations

A first glance at the Analyst Value Survey shows new risks emerging for analyst relations professionals. We’re hosting a webinar on November 30 to hear how leading AR professionals are responding to them, and what the best practice is for your analyst relations program. Three risks stand out massively. First, there a big gap between the firms that vendors think […]

Five things stand out from vendors’ responses to a survey we conducted after our Analyst Relations roundtable at the English Speaking Union. Analysts (including analysts who call themselves consultants or advisors) are often thought to have bias, especially if most of their revenue comes from vendors. Sometimes the effort put into staying informed makes analysts seem very process-driven but less […]

Should someone you know be at the year’s most important discussion on analyst relations? We’ll be at the free ARchitect User Forum 2016 in San José, CA, on November 17. Professionals from industry leaders will introduce the sessions: Lopez Research, Digital transformation; IBM, AR in large organizations; Cognizant, Managing analyst events; Capgemini, AR knowledge management; Wipro, Intelligence-driven relationships; and ARinsights, AR […]

The Analyst Value Survey is open! Each year several hundred users of analyst research tell us which analyst firms they use, and which are most valuable. In exchange, they get access to our results webinar, where they discover which firms are delivering the most value in key market segments. You can take part too. Go to AnalystValueSurvey.com and click on […]

Looking for a new direction in your Analyst Relations career? October is a time when new opportunities pop up in the field. From IBM to Google, we gathered the top US Analyst Relations firms with vacancies needing to be filled. If you’d like to learn more about the opportunity and to schedule an interview, contact these firms directly. However, if […]

As the analyst community becomes more comfortable with Twitter and other forms of social media they are expressing more opinions, and expressing them more strongly. For example, here is a tweet from a Forrester analyst about a vendor he covers (the names have been changed):

Obviously an analyst opining that a vendor “…needs new strategy…” is pretty strong. If a prospect of that vendor reads that tweet then he or she might have a seed of doubt about that vendor planted in their brain. This seed could sprout into a weed of skepticism about the vendor’s viability and put the vendor at a disadvantage in the sales cycle. In addition, competitors’ sales teams could make sure the prospect sees this tweet as way to reinforce any seeds of FUD they are already are trying to sow.

On the positive side, this sort of unfiltered opinion might be one that the analyst has not directly expressed to the vendor. Knowing that the analyst has such a negative opinion gives the vendor the ability to investigate why the analyst perceives this and then work to turn it around.

Get up-to-speed on Twitter quickly by taking SageCircle’s Twitter for AR training. This cost-effective, information packed session is now available as recorded training in addition to public webinar and internal AR Team Briefing. Click here for more information and to register.

Twitter’s Visibility Multiplied through Widgets on other Social Media

Reading an analyst’s tweets is not just limited to Twitter.com or a Twitter desktop client (e.g., TweetDeck or Seesmic) as many people now have widgets on their blogs, websites, LinkedIn and Facebook that display their tweets. As a consequence, the number of people who could be exposed to an analyst’s unfiltered opinion could be much greater than simply those that are formally “followers” of the analyst.

SageCircle Technique:

Determine which of your most relevant analysts are using Twitter or other social media

Set up a monitoring program that utilizes tools like RSS and Tweetdeck for efficiency

Get in the habit of checking daily – it only takes a few minutes – for recent analyst comments

Bottom Line: AR teams can harvest valuable insights into what their analysts are researching by tracking the analysts’ blog posts, tweets, and other forms of social media. Investing a modest amount of effort in setting up a monitoring program can reap big benefits by giving AR early warning about critical opportunities.

Question: AR – Do you have a social media monitoring program in place? If yes, what actionable insights have you gathered from the analysts’ social media usage? If not, why not?

Do you think it would be too much work to monitor analyst commentary on social media? Maybe it would be less than you assume.